FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLER - PAGE 3

The incident has been "blown out of proportion" -- comment by air traffic controller Rodney Tatum to The Palm Beach Post. Yes, that`s what the man said. And the more I think about it, Rodney has a point. Tatum, you will recall, is the controller who was on duty April 29 at Palm Beach International Airport, when there was an incident involving a Delta flight arriving from Fort Lauderdale (on the last leg of a journey from Sacramento). Some incident. According to Palm Beach County sheriff`s officials, Tatum had, ahem, fallen asleep on the job. Not only that -- when they were finally about to roust Rodney from his snooze, the deputies said Tatum was shoeless.

Minutes before Davie pilot Nelson McPherson Jr. crashed in Tennessee last week, he twice told air traffic controllers that he was disoriented, according to a preliminary report released by federal investigators Thursday. McPherson was at the controls of his Beechcraft Bonanza A36 when the plane went down Dec. 22 near a wooded residential area north of Chattanooga. The crash killed McPherson and his wife, Debbie, both 43, along with daughters Danielle, 19, and Kayla, 13. The McPhersons were en route to Chattanooga, where they planned to visit relatives.

Two days and 500 miles short of a world record, Hollywood`s Charles Mack expects to finally land his single-engine, Beechcraft Bonanza in Moscow today. Because a misinformed Finnish air traffic controller told him on Sunday to land in Helsinki, Mack failed to set the Washington D.C.-to-Moscow record for a solo, nonstop, single-engine flight. On Monday, he wanted to fly his plane on to Russia, but paperwork delays, a broken airspeed indicator and expensive Moscow hotels prompted him to wait until today.

The mystery of what caused the crash of a private plane that killed two Broward County couples deepened on Thursday with investigators saying transcripts of the pilot's final transmission show he never reported engine trouble, as first believed. In fact, pilot Haim Israeli, 54, of Plantation, gave no indication at all that anything was amiss with his Cessna 310 as he left Key West at around 10 p.m. on Halloween, bound for Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport, said Alan Yurman, the National Transportation Safety Board investigator assigned to the case.

Why does the press press for this country's defeat? Money. Remember Columbine, the West Virginia Tech school shootings, Hurricane Katrina, Oklahoma City? The endless punditry, the endless interviews of sobbing relatives, the "wall-to-wall" coverage? All this makes money for the press. Money is the life blood of corporations. If the press, and I am talking about Tribune [corporate parent of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel], ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Rupert Murdoch, and all the other large ones, can get the terrorists to come here, think of the profit.

A Dania engineer, his wife and daughter died when their twin-engine airplane crashed into the Chesapeake Bay during a storm spun off from Hurricane Charley Sunday night, a Baltimore County, Md., police spokesman said on Monday. The body of the pilot, believed to be Dania engineer Arthur Benjamin, 60, was found by searchers in the water about 20 feet from the crash site about 8 p.m. Monday, police said. The bodies of the two passengers were found earlier and are believed to be Benjamin`s wife, Yvette, 44, and their daughter, Melissa, 9, police Sgt. Brian Uppercue said.

The sequence of events leading to the crash of Flight 191 is becoming clearer as investigators try to learn what caused the jumbo jet to smash into a runway approach at full throttle. Instants before the Delta Air Lines Lockheed L-1011 hit the ground, an air traffic controller ordered the pilot to abort the landing, but the order came only after the aircraft had skipped across an open field, lurched back into the air, and careened across a highway on the airport perimeter. "Delta, go around!"

A large portion of the air-traffic-control system appeared to function smoothly early Sunday as the clocks in radar centers around Colorado rolled over from Dec. 31, 1999, to Jan. 1, 2000, in a dress rehearsal for New Year's Eve. "Happy New Year! It worked!" proclaimed Jane Garvey, the administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, at a news conference at the Denver Terminal Radar Approach Control, just outside Denver International Airport, at 1:30 a.m. Sunday. The conference followed the three-hour drill observed by aviation executives and two hours of briefings for them.

Troy Wade's family has soothed ruffled feathers in a flap over flaming pink flamingos placed at his gravesite -- by exhuming his body and moving him to a cemetery that welcomes the long-necked plastic birds. Grumbling that the flamingos were tasteless prompted a cemetery association earlier this year to clip the birds' wings, so to speak, by deeming them inappropriate for the 5-acre Lake County burial ground. "They're tacky and everybody complains about them," said Ethel Washburn, treasurer of the Seneca Cemetery Association, explaining the situation before the flamingos were evicted from the cemetery east of Eustis.

While Hollywood aviator Charles Mack taxied his plane onto a runway, an air traffic controller asked him if he was the pilot who tried to set the world record between Moscow and Washington, D.C. Over the noisy vibration of his Beechcraft Bonanza, Mack grinned, hesitated and said, "Yes." Seconds later, Mack, 71, swung his plane onto the runway at North Perry Airport in Pembroke Pines. After glancing at the 25 dials before him, Mack gunned the engine and the single-engine plane roared down the runway.